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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines beekeeper responses to the changing nature and extent of honeybee forage in the modernizing agricultural landscapes of North America’s Great Lakes region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines beekeeper responses to the changing nature and extent of “bee pasture” in North America’s Great Lakes region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing upon regular and lively correspondence within beekeeping periodicals and association records in the Canadian province of Ontario and neighbouring US states, it explores beekeeper efforts to increase the extent of nectar-producing plants and trees through advocacy efforts with neighbouring farmers and surreptitious sowing of “honey plants” along roadsides and uncultivated lands. Deforestation throughout the region by the late nineteenth century had removed important sources of bee forage, such as native basswood, maple, and tulip poplar trees. In response to these changes, beekeepers engaged in tree-planting campaigns in urban and rural settings and promoted the value of nectar-producing cover crops such as alsike and sweet clover, alfalfa, and buckwheat as forage for hoofed livestock and honeybees alike. Aligning their interests with those of neighbouring livestock producers proved an effective strategy for expanding bee pasture in the decades before the Great Depression. Changing agricultural practices in the wake of the Depression years, however, would ultimately reduce the extent and variety of honeybee forage and contribute to reductions in the number of beekeepers and honeybee colonies across the Great Lakes Region by 1940.